Well, I Never Was That Good With Lego Sets!
1/17/12- Today was the first day of class, and the day we began working with Basic 2-Motor NXT cars by Lego Mindstorms.
I WISH I HAD THIS WHEN I WAS A KID! Following diagrams, we each pieced our car together. Some people worked in groups and some, like myself, worked alone. There were SO many parts! I definitely had trouble finding the ones to match the picture because they were so similar to one another– I guess I am not that detail oriented.
The body was not difficult to build at all, neither were the first two wheels.
– It was the small wheel that was giving me trouble:
After about 10 minutes of wondering why my car did not look like the one in the diagram, I found where I went wrong, switched out a small grey lego with 4 attachment pegs, for the correct, and larger, lego piece with 6 pegs– and FINALLY pieced my car together (way after most of the class had moved on to programming).Then I plugged my robot into the computer, but by this time I had missed most of the instructions on programming, so I basically gave up and looked on with the group next to me.
Using LabView, a programming application for the robot-car, we entered commands to get the robot car driving in a straight line. There were many more functions, but by this time it was the end of the class.
Finished Robot Car:
And here is a video I found on Youtube.com that gives you an idea of the Lego Mindstorm robot capabilities and programming.
Lego Mindstorms Tutorial <– Click here!
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1/24/11- Today we used LabView to measure the velocity of the Robot Car.
First, we put the robot-car from last week back together. The car that I picked up was not mine, and the front wheel needed to be reconstructed.
Using LabView, we programmed the car to move in a circle. After we then measured the velocity by hand and compared it to the computer’s calculation and then compared the percent error. The computer said that the distance travelled was .253733 meters and the number of wheel turns was 1.46667 rotations.When I did this by hand I measured .27 meters: percent error was 6.2 %
Great use of pictures! Also, i love how you said, “I WISH I HAD THIS WHEN I WAS A KID!”. I referenced my love for legos in my blog post as well. It was also nice to see that you described where you went wrong in building the actual car. Nice work. This blog response was also not assigned the first day of class, so i respect that you wrote this post (as did i). I am looking forward to see what else you write this semester.